


Double Exposure

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angel Intimacy, First Time, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 22:44:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19755265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: My last time was a first-time from the angle of human intimacy. Bodies. Friction. Lust.This time I'm taking it from the angelic side of desire. Very different. Less visceral. I hope no less intense, in its own way.Hope you like it.





	Double Exposure

Aziraphale: You need to get to Tadfield Air Base.

Crowley: Why?

Aziraphale: World ending. That's where it's all going to happen. Quite soon now. I'll head there too. I just need to find a receptive body. Harder than you'd think.

Crowley: I'm not going to go there.

Aziraphale: I do need a body. Pity I can't inhabit yours.

Crowley: Ooh.

Aziraphale: Angel, demon - probably explode.

Crowley: Blehh

Source: [https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=good-omens-2019&episode=s01e05](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=good-omens-2019&episode=s01e05)

“Did you mind?” The angel is hesitant. What he has done to the woman is taboo—so very not-done in angel culture.

Madam Tracy gives her carefully performed trill of laughter, “Oh, dearie me, goodness, no! A gentleman, you were. Might have been better if you’d asked first, mind you. But once you’d climbed aboard, well… Let’s just say I’ve had worse rides and worse riders.”

Aziraphale cringes. “I did ask,” he mutters, but knows he’s lawyering. He had asked in a voice Madam Tracy could not properly hear, even in mid-séance, and then acted because her soul, her innermost soul, sensing his presence, did not rebel outright, as so many other souls had that terrible day.

She’s not buying it in any case. “There’s asking and there’s asking, Mister Aziraphale. Proper asking leaves room for a lady to set her terms: when, where, how. How much. What happens when it’s over. You didn’t ask, lad. Not properly.”

Aziraphale nods, forlornly, and adds it to his growing list of mortal sins. “I’m sorry,” he says. He concentrates on chasing invisible crumbs of cake across the clean plate. When that runs on too long, he looks for another distraction. “More tea?”

“I won’t complain,” Madam Tracy says. Her eyes are sharp and perceptive. If you had to choose from Songs of Innocence and Experience, well…

She’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright…” Definitely _not_ “Little lamb, who made you?”

“You meant no harm,” she says, firmly, with no nonsense about her. “I knew that from the start—or you’d not have had a foothold. Just don’t fool yourself. The fact that I let you doesn’t mean you asked. Two entirely different issues. Men tend to confuse them all the time.”

“I’m not a man,” Aziraphale says in the same frustrated, pleading voice he’s used far too often on Crowley. “I’m an _angel_.” Even he is not sure if this is supposed to free him from the obligation or absolve him from the failure or exclude him from the entire formula on the grounds that angels are the exception to the rules. Or, just as painfully, if he’s twice as guilty, because angels are, by their very nature, supposed to be incapable of a sin like not even asking before they possess other souls and bodies.

Madam Tracy remains more than a little confused about men and angels. Her own wary sense is that there’s not enough difference between them for her to judge. She pats his hand in maternal kindness. “There, now, lad. Think about it. But don’t waste too much time on it now. You wanted to know what it was like, right?”

Aziraphale blushes a charming pink, reminding her of a white rabbit. His mouth twitches like a rabbit's. His eyes are huge and round, like a rabbit’s. And that furry, tufted hair? She fights back a giggle, hearing her man, Shadwell, swearing in more-or-less broad Scots about the “southron pansy.”

Men! Amusing. Varied. Complex. Scottish witchfinder or angelic bunny rabbit, they’re all scared silly they don’t measure up. In her experience, a wise woman uses that weapon with the skill and constancy a warrior angel uses a flaming sword.

Aziraphale is no warrior angel.

“Come, now, Mister Aziraphale. Tell Madam Tracy all about it. It’s not like we haven’t already been close as sausage is close to a bun.” She sparkles and twinkles and makes her double entendre clear. “You possessed me. You want to know what it was like. Right?”

He nods, blushing brighter still. “Ys.” A little boy could not be more embarrassed or more reduced to squeaking monosyllables.

She smiles, benign. She is a Goddess. Her meditation work tells her so…and what she did not half-believe already, that nice young witch Anathema has taught her. Such amazing affirmations that girl knows! She takes a breath, and says,

“You were lucky. I was ready to be opened, thanks to the séance and all, and I sensed you were more than the average ghost. Not that I was expecting you to sweep in like that. My word—I could hardly believe you’d even fit! The size of you! I didn’t think I could stretch enough to take it all! And so forceful! My word!” She titters. “I quite lost control for a little while, there.” She blushes as pink under her makeup as Aziraphale. “Filled me right up,” she twitters, and stumbles. “That’s not just a thing you say. Well—it _is_ just a thing you say, most of the time. But…” She doodles an invisible, serpentine spiral on the clean white tablecloth with the tip of one crimson fingernail. “It was different. Your average ghost or spirit, it’s in-out-gone. Spent their ticket, took their ride.” She meets Aziraphale’s eyes. “I let you stay, angel. You were too damned big, and you stretched me like nothing else ever had—and don’t you dare tell my Shaddy or I’ll make you sorry. But it was all right, even the not-asking. You had such a big problem, after all. And…” She looks away, eyes a bit lost. Uneasy, she concludes. “You were so afraid. And so brave. And…so in love.”

“What?” Aziraphale has straightened like a man who’s become too chummy with an electrical socket.

“Oh, it was all over you. So in love. With God and with Earth and with that snaky demon of yours. And you couldn’t see any way to have them all. You were almost sure you were going to lose all of them. And you were just…bleeding with it. What’s a girl to do?” She pats his hand again, maternal, and smiles one of her utterly artificial and yet inarguably genuine smiles. She performs her Madam Tracy role—she performs her entire life—and only in the performance is she genuinely herself. Only if you can see how hard she works at it can you possibly hope to see who she really is.

She does not know how much this puts her in the company of angels and demons.

Aziraphale says, softly, “I am in your debt.”

She shrugs. “You and the demon and that boy saved Earth. I think I’ll consider the debt cleared. Though—” She peps up. “I’d be happy for a trip into the City and lunch say, once a month? Me and Shaddy, we don’t regret moving out to Sussex or getting our little bungalow. First time either of us have tried being respectable, and it’s a right treat. But—we’re city folks.” She looks wistfully around the Ritz. “This is quite proper, and after we’re done I’m going shopping, and finish off with a show and room service at the hotel. Once a month would be a treat.”

Aziraphale, who never really needs to worry about money, nods. “As you wish,” he says, then, “So—it wasn’t—painful?” He worries over things like that…

“No, dear. Not painful. Or only a little, in ways that were not bad.”

He nods, trying to integrate the new information with other data points. “Could you…read my mind?”

“Not precisely,” she says, promptly. “Not at all, really. I could hear you when you were saying things to me. And—there were things I’m not sure you wanted me to see that leaked out regardless.” She does not specify. Even for her, the fear was too intense, and the longing—all the different longing—was too intimate. Still…

She sips her tea, then says, “I knew a lot of how you felt. And…about who.” She looks up, then, and meets his cornflower-blue eyes. “I knew you were defying Heaven and Hell for him. That was brave.”

Aziraphale’s mouth tightens, and he can’t maintain the eye contact.

“Running away together to Alpha Centuri would never have worked. No matter how big the universe, _God’s there already_. Where were we supposed to go…really? I thought, well, if I could stop it—even with all Heaven and Hell trying to make it happen, well. If I could stop it, maybe the worst she’d do would be to damn me to the Fall. And if she did that, I’d still have him.”

“That’s not all,” she says. “You were never that selfish. You wanted it all to live—Earth and all her people…”

He shrugged, then risked a smile. “Well, if I was going to be damned I wanted plenty of sins to be damned for.”

She laughs. “I liked you,” she says. Then, correcting herself, she says, “No. I loved you. Love you. But don’t dare tell Shaddy. He doesn’t understand it at all.” She goes brisk and businesslike, then. “You still haven’t really told me why you want to know. Talk, Mr. Aziraphale—or Madam Tracy will spank the naughty angel.” Her smile suggests both teasing—and dead serious demand.

He shakes a finger at her. “Smiting is mine, saith the Lord.”

“Noooo. That would be ‘judgement,’ and its still wrong. Now, talk, you, you…ye’ great Southron Pansy,” she says, laughing, stealing her common-law husband Shadwell’s epithet.

He ducks his head, but agrees. There’s no point asking all this if he doesn’t tell her enough to help her make useful observations. “Heaven and Hell were not exactly pleased with Crowley and me for stopping the War. The very last of Agnes Nutter’s prophecies was for us, and we realized she was suggesting we swap bodies if we wanted to survive. Me take Crowley’s body. Crowley take mine. Like possession, but with one else at home. It worked. We were each—tested—in ways only our counterpart could have survived.”

“Swap bodies? That’s a good one.”

“It is, rather,” Aziraphale admitted, with a smile. “The thing is, there’s one point, halfway through the swap, when you’re both there, in both bodies. It’s…” He blushes, and stirs his already empty tea cup.

He and Crowley were both there, in both bodies, and in each other. Mutual possession… Angel and demon. The universe had not exploded after all.  
  
Or only in a small, intense, privately climactic sort of way.

His human body grows hard thinking about it, remembering the sensations. His spirit body’s aura is so bright that even spirit-blind humans look away from the little table, somehow sure there’s something there they ought not intrude on.

Madam Tracy, that ancient temple whore, senses it all. She shivers, and squints at the soft, fair, innocent angel suffering some sort of spiritual solar flare beside her with the same slightly awed look she’d given when Adam split them apart. Tingly—it had made her very, very tingly.

“You love him,” she says.

The melting, grateful, overwhelmed look he gives her charms her.

“Oh, yes! Thank you! It’s been... I mean…he’s a _demon_. And I’m an _angel_. It’s complicated. And who could I talk to about it? But—yes. I do. So much. I’ve been so worried about it for so long…”

“Because you’re an angel and he’s a demon, and what happens if you let him possess you.” She’s no one’s fool…and she reads those magazines Anathema loans her from cover to cover. “I can see being just a bit fretful, lad…” But her eyes are tender. “But the world didn’t blow up, and you both survived, and you know, now. You can do it.”

He’s quivering with the longing—and reduced to bashful boyhood again. “Ys.”

She nods. “Then do it.”

“You think—I won’t hurt him?”

“Not if you ask first,” she says, dry and amused. “Give him a chance. Let him make some choices.”

“Of course!” he declares, affronted, and Madam Tracy sighs to herself, wishes him all her blessings, and chooses not to tell him how many egotistical young fools she’s heard assure her of that sort of thing, unaware of how difficult it really is.

He wasn’t a stupid angel. Not most of the time. And the snaky cute demon was no intellectual slouch either. They’d work it out. Eventually.

If they didn’t she still had a nice pink flogger she could use to straighten them out.

She smiled, instead, and patted his hand. “Go. Find him. Ask nicely. See where it goes.” And with that she picked up her purse and scurried off to Portobello Road to see what vintage Carnaby Street fashion she could find.

Meanwhile, Aziraphale sought out his demon. It takes three calls without attached miracle and one with before Crowley picks up.

“I thought perhaps we could order take out and do drinks at mine,” Aziraphale says. “My treat.”

The demon hesitates, as though performing some demonic ritual of skepticism, then agrees. Aziraphale has noticed that he often agrees to the angel’s plans, where you’d expect more caution. More snide dismissal.

It has allowed the angel to hope for centuries. Now, after Armegeddon failed to go through, hope has swollen past the shores of the angel’s spirit and flooded his life.

“I have something to ask you.”

“Yeah? So—ok. Ask.”

“Not over the phone.”

Arizaphale can actually hear the shrug—cool man, cool shrug, all Hipster and Paris and James Dean. “Yeah. Ok. Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

By tonight Aziraphale is sick with anticipation, but he’s learned enough from Madam Tracy that he knows he’s got to do this the hard way. So he ushers his best friend into the store, and closes and locks the door, and puts down the blinds, and leads Crowley up the stairs to Aziraphale’s own rooms. There, he turns and meets Crowley’s eyes—or tries to. Those damned sunglasses. With shaking hands he presumes to remove the glasses.

Crowley has twigged that there’s more under way than he expected. Something big.

“What’s up, angel,” he asks, voice shaking just a bit.

Aziraphale says, as preamble, “I had lunch at the Ritz with Madam Tracy today.”

Crowley, more worldly than his angel, immediately goes scampering down a filthy and entirely off-topic rabbit hole. “Angel!” He grins. “So that’s what you want to ask about?” With cheerful good will he leans into the angel’s body, raking his groin over Aziraphale’s thigh. “I’ll show you anything you want. Human bodies can take a bit of getting used to, but…” His grin is salacious. “Oysters are nothin’ on bodies, angel…”

Aziraphale leaps back, blushing, flustered, and scolding. “No! Be serious, Crowley. Just because she’s a…”

“Jezebel?”

“RETIRED Jezebel. And that wasn’t the point. The point is I…I…I posses…” He gulps. This is more difficult than he’d expected. He’s already brick red, unsettled—and Crowley’s advance on his body hasn’t helped in the slightest. This is going to be difficult enough without tangling human intimacy with the Empyrian intimacy of angel and demon kin.

Not that he’s not interested in blending the two. But…

He gulps. One at a time. One thing at a… (shhhh! goddamned!) time. Tonight it’s angel-demon co-possession.

Spirit sex.

“No!” He backs another step away, then scowls at Crowley. “You’re not helping.”

Crowley, becoming intrigued, pauses. “Sorry. Sorry. Thought…”

“No.”

“Mmm.” The tent in Crowley’s pants doesn’t disappear, but he at least pretends it is no longer an item. “So—what?”

“Do you remember when we swapped bodies?”

(Crowley remembers. Often two or three times nightly. He has cried over it. He has been damned for far too long, and the intimacy of that swap haunts him…)

“Oi, ‘m not that old! Of course I remember.”

“I would—I would like to try it again. Only instead of swapping, just…” Aziraphale blushes rose red, the tip of his nose putting Rudolph to shame. He’s actually trembling. “No swap. Just—together. Like…that.”

Crowley’s world is coming apart at the seams.

He can’t do it. He can’t. If he does…

He remembers the intimacy of it. The bits of pure Aziraphale that became just a little bit his own, never to leave his soul. (oh, the ache over Eve—expecting, and the nights so cold, and what kind of stupid test had the Lord Our God inflicted on the poor infants?)(His darling angel broke his heart…)

“Just…”

“Possess each other. Yes.” The angel’s voice still shook with nerves—hope and fear and tension and insecurity.

His soul had overlain Crowley’s like a lover arched over his beloved in bed; like a second negative overlaying a first, in a double exposure composition.:Like a harmonic line complicating a simple melody, moving music from plainsong to organum. Like a touch of seasoning making an otherwise simple meal a gourmet’s delight.

The intimacy of it…

To do it again, on purpose, for its own sake, rather than as a necessary stage in a process chosen to survive the traps of Heaven and Hell?

Time. Time together, moving across each other.

He finally met Aziraphale’s eyes. His Adam’s apple leaped and jerked as he gulped down raw terror and screaming nerves.

“Yes.” It was all he could get out.

“You’re sure?” Aziraphale sounded like he could not believe it. “Certain? I’m not—coercing you?”

Crowley, never all that amenable, snapped. “Oh for Hell’s sake, angel! No. Of course I’m not interested. I’m just a lowly demon and want to jump your bones. I don’t know why you bothered to ask!” The prima donna in him is screaming. He stomps his foot, and flings his arms wide. “Of course I want to do it, you stupid, stupid angel! I’ve always wanted to do it…”

The truth of that statement stops him cold. He’s never been quite willing to say as much even to himself. Now he’s in for trouble!

But all that meets him is silence, and wild blue eyes.

They do not discorporate. Neither do they swap bodies, as before. And, yet, they retreat to a place where they are spirit, not body—a cloud place. A place where they both have wings.

Aziraphale steps close, and offers his hands to his demon.

His demon, suddenly shy and smitten, unable to meet his eyes, places his own palms in Aziraphale’s. They lean their brows together.

Then there are not even clouds. Just two spirits, so intimate they are one conjoined harmony.

Madam Tracy, simmering brussels sprouts for her and Witchfinder Corporal Shadwell’s dinner, looks up, laced through with sudden presentiment of joy. She smiles.

Possession, she knows, is no bad thing, if one of you is an angel, and both of you agree.

She wishes them well—and proceeds to the sausage and mash.

If that night proves a little more tender than even her norm, well—there’s no reason for Shaddy to know he owes it to the demon and the Southron pansy, is there?

After all, all’s well that ends well. Right?


End file.
